


Rodimus' Star

by Iron



Series: Ignatious, Ignite [2]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drabbles, Fluff, Gen, Rodimus explores space with a small metal baby, Rodimus left for reasons, Sparklings, this is self indulgent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:14:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8348623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Iron
Summary: Rodimus explores space with a sparkling on his hip. Figuratively. 
Good luck, mech. 
(A one-shot series)





	1. Nebulae

The Zilunari Nebulae is a massive cloud of largely ionized noble gases, dust, and roughly a half dozen red and blue dwarf stars scattered across an area roughly the size of Luna II. Gold puffs up in clouds edged in pink and purple; scattered bursts of blue drift by lazily, tangled in lines of green lit up by dull starlight. 

Rodimus sits with his spoiler to the breathtaking scene. He’s seen it before. He’ll see it again. There’s something far more fascinating, something far more awesome, in his lap. 

His son - his _son_ \- isn’t more than ten years unfurled, still nothing more than a bundle of wires and struts encased in foil thin armour toddling around in uncoordinated curiosity between his legs. His colors haven’t even come in properly yet, nothing more than blushing suggestions on his grey plating, a mix of teals and reds and yellows that bring to Rodimus’ mind his Sire’s colors. Beautiful but fragile. 

He runs a hand over his soft, small head. He hasn’t even developed his finials yet; his helm is smooth but for his crest vent, dull from lack of polish. Ignis turns his head and bites the tip of his finger, miniscule fangs sinking into the metal. He sucks the energon that wells up eagerly, lapping at the fingertip now caught in his mouth. He’s too young to have developed pre-digestive yet. It’s harmless. Rodimus can barely feel it. 

“Little monster,” he says affectionately. Ignis beeps at him, letting go long enough to smile at him with a messy mouth, optics squinting up. He leans against his carrier’s thigh (blue right now, to match the grey and green) and burbles. His field, small but powerful, flutters with sparkling joy. 

Rodimus feels his fans stutter. 

Bundling up the bitlet in his hands, he holds him close to his spark. Here in the viewing room he can listen to the rest of the ship, alien, organic sounds mixed with cleanly operating mechanics. The ship’s engine runs a soft vibration through him. So close to his bit he can feel his spark, the way it pulls close to Rodimus’, too early separated. The excitable little thing curls close to it, feels it, lets the soft pulse of his soul settle his tinier one. 

He laughs when clumsy hands explore his face, stuttering and strange. Slim, sharp clawed fingers clutch at finials he’s long since removed, catching in the rough stumps where he’d cut them away. It hurts; the nerve endings are still active there. They press against smooth cheeks, the long, thin scars running from his left optic to his right chin, the thin line of his mouth. Rodimus mouths at them, biting down softly on the tiny digits.

Squeaking, Ignis pulls them away. He looks at his carrier with wide, betrayed optics. Rodimus laughs and presses their noses together. “You’re perfect,” he whispers. 

He wouldn’t give this up for anything.


	2. Chapter 2

It has been three days and his sparkling refuses to sleep. Rodimus feels like he should be able to _do_ something, but he _can’t_ , Primus, he barely remembers what bits look like so young, doesn’t know how to do this! 

He curls up on the street corner, little mech sobbing his little voxbox to static, and feels his own sobs bubble up in response. It’s been four days since he’s slept, and two since he’d eaten. Every time his bitlet had sobbed he’d felt his tank curdle - it was such a horrible sound, sharp and loud, driving right through his code. He felt like he was crumbling under the assault of noise. 

“Please stop,” he whispers. Strange organics sneer at him as they walk by, and he ducks his helm in shame. Why couldn’t he just _do_ this > He pats the bit’s back in what he hopes is a soothing way, holding him against his chest. He just squirms and screams louder, voxbox hiccupping. “Primus, bit, please stop crying. Shhh, shhh, you’re okay.” 

He’s close to crying himself. He can feel the sobs building up in his chest, static crawling across his optics. It’s been four days and he feels like a nerve ending rubbed wrong, electricity sparking beneath his plating. 

He just wants it to _stop_ \- he wants to go home and drink too much at Swerve’s, he wants to needle Magnus until he gets that ridiculous look on his face, he wants to argue with Megatron and he wants to _go h_ \- 

“Are you okay?” He jerks his helm up. There’s an alien standing there, one of the organics. A pretty grey skinned thing with huge purple eyes and long, thick tentacles sprouting from her head. They wave and spread around her. She has a miniature version of herself in her arms, which is peering at them both curiously. Slowly, it’s eyes begin to wet and its face grows bright red. “I saw you - new matraes?” 

He shakes his head. “Matraes?” He mutters. The words fall clumsy from his mouth. When was the last time he actually spoke to someone? Crews who hire him don’t expect him to talk. He’s not much more than a dumb machine to them. 

“Ah - the common Federal tongue calls it _mother_ , yes? Bearer of children.” Her words are slow and unsure. She has an accent, but Rodimus can’t tell what it is. 

“I - no. He’s... Not a child.” He stares at her. Old, familiar fear chokes him. “He’s -” He scrambles to find an explanation. His mind is blank. “He’s not.” 

She snorts. “Ah, yes, yes, as you say. It looks to me like you are having trouble. Would you like me helping you?” 

His little mech squirms harder, cries ratcheting up another painful notch. “Yes! That - yes. You know how to do,” he bounces him in his hands, “This?” 

She sets her own child on the ground, where it sits on its diapered rump and wails. “Yes. I am matri of four, this is easy. Let me have the child.” 

For a moment he hesitates, because he doesn’t know her and his bit is all he has left and he would die if something happened to him, if he screwed him up like he does everything else, but then his voice cracks and takes on a painful edge and he hold him out to her. “Please,” he begs. “I don’t know how to make him stop crying. He’ll eat and he cries, and he won’t sleep, and I’ve done everything I can think of but he just won’t stop.” He’s almost crying himself by the end. 

The bitlet is almost hilariously huge in her arms. She rocks him back and forth experimentally. It doesn’t help. “You give baths?” 

Rodimus nods mutely. 

“You feed him good food?” 

“I... I feed him what I can.” 

“It is the way things are.” She nods, her long tentacles running over him. “Is... ah, he does filter things, yes? I know my baesish, my babies, they have gills at the youngest age. In bad water they get rashes and their little pollution sack need be emptied.”

“His filters could be clogged? That’s all?” His shoulders slump. “Three days of this and his filters are it?” Primus, he’s bad at this. 

She hands him back. “You do that and check. Is a likely thing. I can hear him, those hiccups? His insides sounds strange.” Rodimus lays the bit chest down on his palm. His fingers carefully search out the tiny set of latches he knows are on his sides. It takes him only a second to flip them and pull out the filters set into the long tubes. 

For the first time in over two weeks he is finally, amazingly, unthinkingly calm. 

It’s such a relief Rodimus almost cries. Instead he hold the filters out to the strange organic. “Do you have water you can pour over these?” 

She takes them from him easily, seemingly unconcerned about handling the internals of another sentient being. “It is just like dirty diapers,” she assures him. “I will ask shop owner for sink, you stay here.” He watches her go. 

Her child leans against his leg and yawns sleepily, mouthing its fist. Its short head tentacles squirm over his shin plating. “... I can’t believe she left you here,” he tells it. After a moment he adds, “I’m really screwed. Your matraes is really kind. Lucky brat.” He puffs his cheeks out. 

The little alien laughs. People are still staring. He feels better about it now. 

The alien comes back, holding the filters up. “Store let me wash and dry them in bathroom,” she assures him. “They are very clean.” 

He slots them back into place with a smile. His bit squirms a bit, then sighs, and relaxes, and finally, finally falls into recharge. “Thank you,” he says, and leans against the building behind him. 

The alien smiles at him. “You are very welcome,” she says. “Matrixor is hard on people who are alone.” 

“...Yeah.” He smiles at her. They both pretend it isn’t pathetically grateful. “What’s your name?” 

“I am Zinara.” She gathers her baby up in her arms. “My wives and I own a ship. Is a small one, but we are happy. And it is dangerous, in the merchant areas. Pirates.” 

He stares at her. She smiles back, and suddenly he is hit by the notion that she is _kind_. How long has it been since someone spared him a kind word, a gesture? Too long, years, forever. He's felt like he's rusting from the inside for so long... 

Primus, he wants to cry. 

When Zinara presses her hand to his shoulder he does, messy, ugly sobs as he clutches his bitlet to his chest. She just keeps smiling at him.


	3. Chapter 3

“Ignis,” his carrier growls. 

Ignatius frowns. He runs his fingertips over the bulkhead, then glances down to compare it to the photo on his pad. Wet paint seeps into the seams of his finger armor, cold and slick feeling. “Yeah?” 

“Get down from there.” Backbite sounds pissed, which makes Ignatius grin. He looks over his shoulder and down at his carrier, twisting in his harness to get a good view of his expression. 

“Nananana~” He sings, “You can’t catch me!” He waggles his fingers at his carrier. Paint drips onto Backbite’s face. 

He wipes the paint off his cheeks with two fingers, smearing it part way. The red stands out in stark contrast to his snow-pale faceplates and his pale green fingers, yellow optics narrowed. “I will climb up onto that bulkhead and drag you down here, bitlet!” 

Ignatious cackles, a kick to the bulkhead sending him spinning. The harness is attached to one of the guns, letting him hang down under the bridge’s viewscreen to paint his masterwork. There’s red on his lap, mixed with a deep blue, yellow up to his elbow. 

There’s an angel on the ship, now, and he looks a lot like Ignis. Or Backbite, if Backbite were red and blue and still had his spoiler. Below it Ignis had finger-painted the sweetest message he ever did see - ‘Frag the Pirates fragging me!’ 

Someone cuts the line and he hits the floor hard enough to dent his entire backside. Ignis doesn’t care. He can barely feel it through the euphoria. Frag them! Hahaha! Deity, it felt good to say that. Frag the whole entirety of _fragging_ space! 

He’s still laughing when Backbite drags him back to their chartered ship. They’ll be gone in less than an hour anyways. Ignis times his pranks, thank you very much. He’s never had to face the consequences of his actions yet.


	4. Chapter 4

Holding him was like holding fire itself. It burned. It hurt. 

It was the most delicious pain he’d ever felt. 

Their kisses had been wet, and hot, biting, energon filled things as lips were split by sharp denta. Their hands dented and crumpled plating as they force their frames together, as their hands wrapped around each other. 

God, he’d been beautiful. Even in his rage, his hate, bearing down on him in all the anger he could muster, he’d been beautiful. His faceplates had twisted up and he’d bared his denta as his blue, blue optics flickered like candles in the dark of his habsuite. 

He remembers how Rodimus had kissed him. 

He remembers how Rodimus had curled in his arms afterwards, their charge spent, shaking apart. Exhausted he had allowed him to press soft kisses to that red plating, lave his tongue across the sensitive edge of his spoiler, stretch him out against his body. The racer had been forced to listen as he’d whispered about how beautiful he was, how wonderful, how good, too exhausted to move. 

His racer would not meet his optics in the morning, gone before he woke. He was never going to stay, he knew. Rodimus would never love him. He’d tried to convince him. Whisper about his own affections into his audial. Wrapped his hands around his slim waist and forced him to take everything he could give - his affection, his love, his pleasure - until Rodimus had crumpled beneath the knowledge that he would give everything he could to the bot. Everything to the bot. Until he was forced to accept everything he would give. 

Rodimus had finally, finally given into it. 

He’d thought he was winning him over. Finally, finally, he’d thought the racer would give him a _chance_. 

Instead he’d _left_. 

He remembers waking up and realizing Rodimus was gone. He’d waited for him to return. He hadn’t. The ship hadn’t even realized he was missing until someone had noticed the Rod Pod was gone. By then the trail had been cold. 

He’d thought he was deactivated. They all had. 

Then the books had started popping up. 

They were inane. Idiotic. They barely related to the _Lost Light_ and her crew at all - books about former pirates hunting for the greatest pirate ship to have ever flown and her crew, immortal and brilliant, and her treasure, undeniable. An utopia. The greatest adventurers to have ever taken to space. 

The crew of the _Knight Light_ was constantly getting sidetracked on inane sidequests. It has over three hundred installments in the main storyline, not including sidetracks of sidetracks, spiderwebbed storylines. 

It’s what made him think Rodimus was alive. Those books, those horrible, brilliant books written like his spark’s awful reports, they’d been so horribly obtuse and so stupidly insightful it’d have to have been one of the crew. 

He owns every installment. No one else knows, 

When he reads them he imagines Rodimus writing them somewhere, hanging out in a bar on a backwater planet with far too much highgrade in his tank and far too little actual fuel. 

He’s in love with a mech who writes him like he hates him.


	5. Chapter 5

The edges of the world are hazy and unreal. Rodimus leans his head against the wall of the alley and feels it tilt and spin on its axis. His fuel lines are full of high grade and he’s never felt better about the world. His mouth tastes sour and his plating too tight, itchy, aching. In the back of his brain he can feel the pain of his recent welds starting to set in. 

Ignis purrs in his lap, black hand clasped in his two tiny clawed ones. Sharp fingertips trace indents in the metal. The needle sharp tips cut through the paint clogging the seams. He’s too young to speak yet, but Rodimus is almost sure he can understand speech. 

“This is why we can’t go home,” Rodimus whispers. He wiggles his fingers and his bitlet laughs. “Your carrier messed up.” 

They’re on shore leave. Zinara had left him to his devices for a few days while she and the wives loaded up the ship’s cargo hold with loot. She’d been grateful to send him on his way, casting guilty glances at the welded ruin of his spoiler as he’d gone. 

“Take time with your son,” she told him as she pressed a credit pad into his servos. “Find a good mechanic.” 

He hasn’t done either thing. He should probably feel guilty. Ignis giggles and flaps his wide, sharp spoilerwings. Rodimus can feel his own attempt to echo the motion, instinct telling him _this is how you teach him_. Sharp sparks of pain lanced up his spinal strut where the welded metal on his spoilerhub rubs against the wall. 

The highgrade dulls it enough to keep him from screaming, but his back arches and his mouth falls open as his optics glitch out. He downs another shot of engex and waits for the chemical bliss to dull the pain. 

He can’t go to a mechanic. They’ll find some way to report it, or they’ll gossip, and - well, getting caught, captured, tortured and summarily murdered has never been on his list of things to do. In a few stellars he’ll slip away from the ship again and have some backalley Ammonite medic take a look at it for credits he... currently doesn’t have. Time will rectify that problem, at least. 

If Primus is righteous time’ll fix everything. He just has to wait the rest of the universe out long enough to get the both of them gone and forgotten about. Then he can go home. Then he can finally, finally take Ignis _home_. 

“I’m gonna show you where you should have unfurled,” he tells his laughing little bit. The engex makes his hold lax and Ignis starts to squirm, making unhappy noises. His field burrs discontentedly against Rodimus’ white and gold plating. “And I’ll tell you all the stories you should have had in the meantime, yeah?” He smiles and tucks the mechlet close to his chest plate. After a moment the bitlet crawls inside the chamber where he’d grown, transforming into that strange puzzle piece form that fits so perfectly there. He pats the side of him, where he fits nearly seamlessly against the rest of his chest plating. 

“How about one while your carrier sobers up, huh? Let’s see.” He tilts his head up to look at the sky. Even here, even after four million years, he’s amazed to see the stars. He’s never seen a picture in the lights, but he knows the stories like they’d all known the stories. “Once upon a time, that’s how these are supposed to start, right? Once upon a time there was a pair of twins, floating through space. They were caught in each other’s orbits, because you see these were planet-twins, and they loved each other fiercely. But one decided that he wanted more than his twin...”


	6. Chapter 6

Their hab is lit in blue lights. 

The lights are dull, creating ghost outlines of furniture, barely visible. Purple slashes across their berth where it mixes with the red of Rodimus' biolights, barely brighter in recharge than the lights fixed to the corners of the room. 

Rodimus had fought him on their inclusion, months ago. It was only days of rechargeless anxiety and several sharp words from his co-captain that had him allowing them, complaining the entire time. Thunderclash had felt shamed for needing them, even after explaining what it was like, to be trapped within his own frame, in utter darkness for months, and his fear of returning to that. 

They both recharge better with the lights. Rodimus lays insensate in his arms, cheek mashed against his chestplate, arms sprawled over the berth and Thunderclash’s abdomen, legs hooked into his. He can feel his every ventilation, calm and even, and the steady pulse of his spark. In the low light he is beautiful; the blue cuts across the straight line of his nose, highlighting the softness of his bottom lip, the tilt of his shuttered optics. Thunderclash pets his spoiler hub, arm caught under the weight of his mech, and feels whatever pulled him from recharge release him. 

"I love you," he tells his sleeping mate. He knows hearing it back will be a long time in coming, no matter what he feels. Rodimus may love him for a thousand years and insist otherwise. His lover is as soft as diamond, crueler than even he knows; an off-hand word wounds him more deeply than any Decepticon's blast. 

There is the memory of hatred sunk into his spark, as pale as the light that makes their hab so welcoming at night. 

Rodimus stirs, yawns, and tilts his head up. A sliver of blue, recharge-dark, is revealed. "Hmm?" He says, still mostly asleep. 

Thunderclash hushes him. "It's nothing," he reassures him. "An idle thought." 

Rodimus huffs and buries his face in Thunderclash’s chest. "Sleep," he commands. 

"Yes, my love." 

He makes a soft, pleased sound, and falls back into recharge. He won't remember this in the morning, Thunderclash knows. He kisses the top of his helm, then lays back and does as his mech command. 

He sleeps, knowing that they will have a long, long time to figure out things like hab lights and saying "I love you".

**Author's Note:**

> This is self indulgent and I don't care~ 
> 
> A place for fics that don't belong in the actual story line.


End file.
